LAESH CLOTHING - YOUR LOCAL BRAND

Our story
Growing up skateboarding but close to nature in a small town next to the sea created a natural platform for Laesh. We wear streetwear daily but cannot identify with the wear and tear mentality so common today amongst cheap clothing brands. Just a quick glimpse behind the scenes of these sometimes big internationally known brands show unethical and non-sustainable business practices which must be made a thing of the past.

We want to create an affordable and ethical clothing line, not just to make clothes we want to wear ourselves, but to be a part of a bigger revolution taking away manufacturing and business practices that harm nature and people and instead helping create a sustainable and ethical choice for our likeminded friends.

We will never be the biggest brand, and have no intention of being so either, instead we see ourselves as part of a bigger movement coming together to create different kind of brands and clothes to different people but with one overarching goal – to help the global fashion business go from a wear and tear mentality to an ethically and environmentally sustainable business

Laesh was founded in the fall of 2011 by six friends. The starting point was to create a leisure activity and creative outlet where friendships and individual backgrounds in fashion, skateboarding, photography, graphic design and business could be used to create a brand together. The idea in the beginning was that Laesh would be a modern clothing and accessory brand in the streetwear category.

Laesh [læsh]
With a strong connection to the hometown, the founders (when local was started in 2011) chose the name Laesh [læ: ʃ], a rewritten and more international variant of the slang term “lääsch”.

The term “lääsch” is among the founders’ hometown Jakobstads inhabitants a familiar expression that since the 90’s has been used to describe something that is positive, relaxed and good. An expression that is used as a description of both situations and emotions, but which also describes a way of thinking and an attitude.

The choice of name also put a local patriotic stamp on the brand from the beginning and several different products and companies that belong to Jakobstad’s history have been used as inspiration to produce logos and graphics, e.g. Sun Ice, Strengbergs, the city’s symbols of faith, hope and love, as well as anchors and seas.

Made in Jeppis
The Laesh clothes are designed and printed in Jakobstad/Pietarsaari aka “Jeppis”. The main printing method we use is manual screen printing, which is a printing method where you recreate the graphics / print with the help of so-called screen printing frames through which you then textile print the graphics on the clothes in one or more colors with real paint. Since the clothes are not produced on an assembly line by a machine on the other side of the globe but right here locally in Jakobstad, Finland by humans, there may be small differences in the clothes.

This means that the clothes are individually unique as the garment can have different amounts of paint, splashes of paint on “errors between places” and other things that can be perceived as defects but as we here at Laesh usually call the garment’s personality that makes it unique.

So if the garment you buy is not completely “perfect” and there are minor variations between the garments, don’t worry it is the garment’s personality that shines through and is the sign of a human manually creating the prints and not a robot or machine.
We strive to use organic cotton garments wherever possible.

Your local brand
Since we design and print the garments locally and use a lot of symbology from the local region, you can rightly call Laesh your local brand. But as we the people behind Laesh travel a lot for business and pleasure and have lived in many different places in the world, Laesh is not only a local brand to Jakobstad. We want Laesh to be everyones local brand regardless of where you are located in the world. Because we are Laesh wherever we are, and so are you!